Saratoga News file photograph
The white puffs are trees filled with blossoms. This photograph, taken about 1919, looks toward Los Gatos from the Saratoga hills.
The quota for one blossom was one prune. Or apricot. Or cherry. Or almond. The point was that all the floral glory of early spring was translated into hard work come harvest time, when the millions of blooms fulfilled their destiny. This hard-work aspect seemed especially true of prunes, which often had to be picked from lumpy, unyielding clods on the hard ground and usually in the hottest days of late summer.
But all was forgiven at blossom time. In the Santa Clara Valley it was a never-to-be-forgotten experience, and Saratoga was right in the heart of it. It was a phenomenon that invited the most blatant of cliches: "air heavy with the perfumed scent," or "a sea of white stretching across the valley." As a sometime scrivener, I probably turned out more than my share of turgid prose on the subject, but that was the redeeming thing about the blossoms: It was impossible to exaggerate.
Painters like Theodore Wores, whose studio was in the old Methodist Church, now the Arthur Mintz photography studio, captured the scene on canvases that today are highly prized museum pieces. Poets, writers, photographers all worked at preserving in some fashion these vistas of incomperable beauty. It was as if some master gardener had been given carte blanche to create an arboreal wonderland--but shucks, here we go again, getting into that turgid prose.
From my own recollections, going back to the 1920s and '30s, it was spectacular enough. Earlier, it could have been an even more impressive sight. That was when the Glen Una Ranch was literally in full flower, before being subdivided around 1919. The Glen Una Ranch consisted of 680 acres, 350 of which were in prunes, 160 trees to the acre, making it the largest bearing prune orchard in the world, according to an 1895 souvenir publication, "Sunshine, Fruit and Flowers."
Presiding over this operation was one Francis G. Hume, better known as Frank Hume, who was the source of one of my favorite stories about Saratoga. Hume, who was fatally injured in an accident on the ranch in 1897, had made his domain a genuine showplace, installing up-to-date equipment, such as electric lights in the dry yard so that trays could be set out at night after the day's dust had settled. He also had an electric generating plant and installed a telephone line to Los Gatos, rather than Saratoga, which was closer.
The reason he chose Los Gatos, which had its own telephone company, now part of GTE, was that his ranch hands, or at least some of them, would go to Saratoga to patronize its many saloons, rendering them unfit for work. This anti-Saratoga bias on Hume's part reverberated down the years in the form of tolls that phone subscribers had to pay, in some instances even to call across the street. This, of course, was because of the separate companies, a situation that was not corrected until rates were harmonized around 1950.
Frank Hume aside, it was only natural that, sooner or later, someone in the county would capitalize on the blossom experience in the sense of making it the focus of a celebration. In Saratoga, this happened sooner rather than later, and the saga of the Rev. Edwin Sydney "Everlasting Sunshine" Williams and the Saratoga Blossom Festival is well-ensconced in town lore. In a future Stereopticon column I will trace the history of this event, which had its origin in 1900 and continued in rather elaborate form through 1941.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, February 5, 1997.
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